Michael Palin, world famous member of Monty Python, also a well-traveled storyteller, puts it this way:
"Once you get the travel fever, there's no known cure, and I like to suffer from it for the rest of my life."
Traveling begins with a vision
An idea.
How it might be.
The culture. The language. The climate. The people. The food.
Maybe the dangers too ...
But it's always different.
Because reality rarely meets expectations.
So in the end, all it takes is a decision.
To leave.
Stagnation is the Beginning of the End
300 years ago Blaise Pascal claimed:
"The misfortune of men is due solely to the fact that they are not able to stay quietly in a room."
I prefer to leave the room from time to time and let myself fall into the unknown. To let things run their course.
For stagnation is the beginning of the end.
The Polish Nobel Laureate in Literature has a clear opinion on the matter:
"As I stood on the floodwall, immersed in the sight of the current, I realized that, despite all dangers, what is in motion will always be better than what is at rest, that change is nobler than constancy, that the immovable must decay and dissolve and become rubble and ashes, while the movable can even last forever." (Olga Tokarczuk - from "Flights")
Travel is a start.
The beginning of the beginning.
Life takes place everywhere
Even where nobody suspects it.
In small, poor villages.
Or run down buses and trains.
And also in hidden little restaurants, where the boss looks like belonging to a local mafia clan, but cooks like God in France.
In the middle of a crowd of cheering children begging for sweets.
On trecks far away from civilization.
Amidst bare mountains and wastes.
Just everywhere.
So go get out ... on the Road ... again.
Detailed information on the Backpacking in Asia and America - see the next page.